Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) recently launched an initiative on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Public Policy. On Friday, December 8, 2017, we’ll be in Washington DC talking about AI and policy.

The event is at the National Press Club, at 12:15-2:15pm on Friday, December 8. Lunch will be provided for those who register in advance.

The agenda includes:

Ed Felten, with a background briefing on AI and the AI policy landscape,

Arvind Narayanan on AI and fairness,

Olga Russakovsky on diversifying the AI workforce,

Chloe Bakalar on AI and ethics, and

Nick Feamster on AI and freedom of expression.

For those who can stay longer, we’ll have a roundtable discussion with the speakers, starting at 2:30.

Secure messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Confide are making inroads among lawmakers, corporate executives and other prominent communicators. Spooked by surveillance and wary of being exposed by hackers, they are switching from phone calls and emails to apps that allow them to send encrypted and self-destructing texts. These apps have obvious benefits, but their use is causing problems in heavily regulated industries, where careful record-keeping is standard procedure.

Among those “industries” is the government, where laws often require that officials’ work-related communications be retained, archived, and available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act. The move to secure messaging apps frustrates these goals.

The switch to more secure messaging is happening, and for good reason, because old-school messages are increasingly vulnerable to compromise–the DNC and the Clinton campaign are among the many organizations that have paid a price for underestimating these risks.

The tradeoffs here are real. But this is not just a case of choosing between insecure-and-compliant or secure-and-noncompliant. The new secure apps have three properties that differ from old-school email: they encrypt messages end-to-end from the sender to the receiver; they sometimes delete messages quickly after they are transmitted and read; and they are set up and controlled by the end user rather than the employer.

If the concern is lack of archiving, then the last property–user control of the account, rather than employer control–is the main problem. And of course that has been a persistent problem even with email. Public officials using their personal email accounts for public business is typically not allowed (and when it happens by accident, messages are supposed to be forwarded to official accounts so they will be archived), but unreported use of personal accounts has been all too common.

Much of the reporting on this issue (but not the Times article) makes the mistake of conflating the personal-account problem with the fact that these apps use encryption. There is nothing about end-to-end encryption of data in transit that is inconsistent with archiving. The app could record messages and then upload them to an archive–with this upload also protected by end-to-end encryption as a best practice.

The second property of these apps–deleting messages shortly after use–has more complicated security implications. Again, the message becoming unavailable to the user shortly after use need not conflict with archiving. The message could be uploaded securely to an archive before deleting it from the endpoint device.

You might ask why the user should lose access to a message when that message is still stored in an archive. But this makes some sense as a security precaution. Most compromises of communications happen through the user’s access, for example because an attacker can get the user’s login credentials by phishing. Taking away the user’s access, while retaining access in a more carefully guarded archive, is a reasonable security precaution for sensitive messages.

But of course the archive still poses a security risk. Although an archive ought to be more carefully protected than a user account would be, the archive is also a big, high-value target for attackers. The decision to create an archive should not be taken lightly, but it may be justified if the need for accountability is strong enough and the communications are not overly sensitive.

The upshot of all of this is that the most modern, secure approaches to secure communication are not entirely incompatible with the kind of accountability needed for government and some other users. Accountable versions of these types of services could be created. These would be less secure than the current versions, but more secure than old-school communications. The barriers to creating these are institutional, not technical.

This week the European Commission (EC) announced that it is fining Google $2.7 billion for anti-competitive tactics in the company’s iconic search product. In this post I’ll unpack what’s going on here.

I have some background on this topic. In 2011-12, when I was Chief Technologist at the FTC, the agency did a big investigation on this same topic. The FTC eventually decided not to bring a case against Google for this behavior. The EC has now reached a different conclusion.

The EC makes two main claims. First, they claim that Google dominates the search engine market in Europe–it’s pretty hard to argue with that. Second, they claim Google designed its dominant search product in ways that unfairly advantage the company’s own Google Shopping product and unfairly disadvantage competing comparison shopping products.

Competition law is complicated, and I won’t presume to offer any legal analysis. But the basic principles motivating competition policy are not too complicated. Fair competition is encouraged. If your business grows because you improve your product, or manage your operations well, or negotiate shrewdly, or simply happen to be in the right place at the right time, that’s all good. If you amass dump trucks full of money doing this, then good for you, and thank you for your tax dollars. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work.

But if your effort is devoted to preventing fair competition, then you are probably harming consumers, and that’s a competition policy problem. To see the difference, suppose you’re in the business of delivering packages to people’s homes. Fair competition means buying better trucks, optimizing routes and schedules, hiring better employees, and so on. But if you send out employees to block your competitors’ trucks, that is an anticompetitive tactic.

Now back to Google. The EC says that when users do searches relevant to shopping, Google gives its own Google Shopping product preferred placement in the search results–and higher placement leads to more clicks and more sales–while demoting competing shopping products in the search results. These two claims, self-promotion and competitor-demotion, may sound similar at first, but they raise different issues for us in understanding the case, so let’s look at them separately.

On the self-promotion claim, we know the relevant facts. On shopping-relevant searches, Google puts a box at or near the top of the search results, showing Google Shopping results with images of items for sale. That is a valuable benefit that Google Search is giving to the Google Shopping product. Is this anticompetitive? Google’s strongest argument to the contrary is that the Shopping box is essentially an ad, and Google already places ads at the top of the page. If Google auctioned that space off to the highest bidder for advertising, nobody would object. So why is it a problem if Google gives that advertising space to Google Shopping? The company could make a symbolic payment to itself to buy the space, if that made a difference to anybody.

The competitor-demotion claim is very different–the theory is less complicated, but the analysis depends more on facts not available to the public. If Google is gratuitously demoting its shopping competitors in search results, that is problematic. But Google says it is not doing that–it says that those competitors’ placements arise naturally from a search ranking algorithm based on design decisions that the company made for legitimate, pro-consumer reasons.

It’s hard for the public to tell who is right. Google’s ranking algorithm is complicated, and it changes constantly, as the Web changes and as Google works to counter sites’ attempts to game the algorithm. Is there evidence that Google tweaked the algorithm with the goal of demoting shopping competitors? Did the company make algorithm changes for the wrong reasons, or did suspicious changes happen outside the normal process? These questions are answerable in principle, but only by looking at the company’s internal information, which the EC might have but we, the public, do not.

At this point, I need to put some of my cards on the table and admit that I know more about this topic, having worked on the FTC’s investigation which asked some of the same questions. But that investigation was confidential, for good reasons, and I will not violate that confidentiality. All I’ll say is that the FTC had the legal power to compel answers to factual questions about Google’s practices (and an obligation to keep the answers confidential) and, having conducted a thorough investigation, the FTC decided not to bring a case against Google.

So why did the European authorities get a different result than the U.S. authorities? The answer might lie in differences between European and American competition law. Or it might lie in the fact that European authorities find it easier to enforce against a foreign company. Regardless of the reason, Google is presumably looking for ways to resolve the complaints that led to this investigation being started.

Freedom to Tinker is hosted by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you'll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center's faculty, students, and friends.